Y de pronto, no estás. Adiós, amor, adiós.---
Ya te marchaste.
Nada queda de ti. La ciudad gira:
molino en el que todo se deshace.
At bigla kang nawala. Paalam, pag-ibig, paalam.
Nakaalis ka na.
Walang iniwang bakas. Umiikot ang siyudad:
parang gilingan na dinudurog ang lahat.
And suddenly, you are not there. Good-bye, love, good-bye.
You already left.
Nothing remains of you. The city turns:
It is a mill where everyhing falls apart.
Ciudad
Ángel González
(Oviedo, 1925 - Madrid, 2008)
Berson sa Metro reminds me of the Ikot Poetry project of UP Quill several years back: poems posted in public vehicles for people to read. I've often wondered if it was really successful but I've always liked reading those poems.
This poem excerpt caught my attention while I was riding the train this evening. It was short, plain and easy to read; and yet it presented a compelling image. Which is odd since the excerpt was about absence; the image was of someone who was no longer there.
I think I liked this poem because it used a better version of the style I was trying to achieve when I was still writing poems. And the excerpt ended with a declaration of cynicism and resignation.
I was able to translate the first three lines to English with little difficulty. The tenses might be wonky since I never really learned enough Spanish and was mostly basing it on the Filipino translation. The last line, I had to feed through Google translation because I wasn't satisfied with the translations I came up with. Google's translation was surprisingly poetic, so I used it with hardly any alteration.
The complete text of the poem in Spanish could be read here.
2 comments:
Hey, you remember our Ikot Poetry project! As for its success, I suppose it was successful, just not sustained consistently. The Instituto Cervantes' own project does improve train rides greatly.
it's a much better thing to see than most ads in the trains. also i remember a globe ad campaign sa MRT before that i thought was pretty clever.
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